Xerox Phaser 6128MFP review

Summary

Our Score

7/10

Review Price £472.63

Combining colour laser print with scanning, copying and fax in one machine is both space-saving and cost-effective, but every component has to be well matched. Xerox has a range of full colour multifunction devices and the Phaser 6128MFP sits nearer to the bottom than the top end of its range.

This is a big machine, measuring over half a metre tall, and is considerably bigger than it looks in Xerox’s brochure. It would be best on a stand of its own, rather than taking up somebody's desk space.
All decked out in Xerox’s trademark white and dark blue, the machine has a slightly old-fashioned scanner-on-top-of-a-printer appearance. It's designed so that the scanner, complete with its 35-sheet Automatic Document Feeder (ADF), sits across the output tray of the printer. The right-hand side of the machine is open, to make removing printed documents easier.

There's a single, 250-sheet paper tray at the bottom of the machine, with a single sheet feed slot just above. This provision is the weakest area of the design, as a busy office will get through 250 sheets quickly and there's no option to add any extra trays.

The control panel is quite busy, with eight quick-dial fax buttons on the left-hand side, as well as a full numeric pad towards the right for individual number dialling. This number pad serves a secondary purpose for entering passwords, so you can send a secure print job and collect it at the printer by entering a personal password.
The fully-bitmapped, backlit LCD display is used in a variety of ways, for everything from toner status display to menu options, though more could be done to display graphical help as on some other multifunctions of this type.

There are sockets at the back for USB and Ethernet, as well as for a phone line and an optional, third-party handset.

To get the machine running, you first pull down the front panel to reveal the transfer belt and four colour print drums, each of which needs tapes removing. Behind the door on the right-hand side are four toner cartridges and each of these must also be locked in place before the machine can print.

Xerox supports Windows, Apple OS X and SUSE and Red Hat Linux and there's a scan to desktop utility written by Nuance and a PCL 6 driver for Windows customers.